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Cover artist Mark Fredrickson, who does 90% of all the MAD covers these days, used to be THE name in airbrush illustration. Then one day he decided digital is the way to go, and spent a month looking over the shoulder of a colleague who did digital painting. Now Mark is 100% digital. I think he uses PhotoShop but I don’t know for certain. I believe he uses some Photo-Shop manipulated photos combined with digital painting to create his images.

I remember when you were doing the MAD Kids Spidey cover, and you mentioned your work being too ‘cartoony’ for a regular MAD cover. Not true, especially when you do the ‘painterly’ look without holding lines.

It’s interesting to see how much the cover style has changed since I started reading MAD as a kid. Imagine if Richard Williams and Norman Mingo had Photoshop at their disposal!

Mort has always done a kind of collage/montage sort of thing with his splash pages, where elements are clearly not meant to be taken as literally within a set space or environment. Hence the fading out or shorthand figures and the differences in character sizes. You may notice Mort has eschewed traditional ink line for a softer approach with more pencil and sketchier drawing style… I think that is a result of the modern scanners ability to pick up lines that the old half tone photostats just couldn’t reproduce.